Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges

Stephan F. Miescher, Michele Mitchell, Naoko Shibusawa

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781119052203
• eBook ISBN: 9781119052180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges presents a collection of original readings that address gendered dimensions of empire from a wide range of geographical and temporal settings.

• Draws on original research on gender and empire in relation to labour, commodities, fashion, politics, mobility, and visuality
• Includes coverage of gender issues from countries in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia between the eighteenth to twentieth centuries
• Highlights a range of transnational and transregional connections across the globe
• Features innovative gender analyses of the circulation of people, ideas, and cultural practices

PART I
Labour

1
The Sexual Politics of Imperial Expansion: Eunuchs and Indirect Colonial Rule in Mid-Nineteenth-Century North India

Jessica Hinchy

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, eunuch slaves known as khwajasarais (literally, lord-superintendents of the house) were numbered among the political elite of the state of Awadh in north India, an autonomous state that was formerly part of the Mughal Empire. Khwajasarais had a legal status as slaves, but were politically significant courtiers, government officials, military commanders, intelligencers, landholders and managers of elite households as well. Indeed, a khwajasarai slave named Almas Ali Khan was the second most powerful figure in late-eighteenth-century Awadh, with the exception of the Awadh ruler. Almas Ali was the revenue farmer, or ‘Amil’, of over a third of Awadh, the commander of a military force that was larger than the Awadh ruler's and the director of extensive commercial operations. In short, he was one of the most powerful ‘warrior entrepreneurs’ in north India.¹ In the early nineteenth century, the Awadhi historian Faiz Bakhsh Khan described one of Almas Ali's contemporaries, Jawahir Ali Khan, as a noble who lived in a style of ‘pomp and magnificence’ and was surrounded by ‘men of learning and art such as were not to be found near [the] Nawáb’. Jawahir Ali was reportedly ‘so dignified that, when any of [the Nawab's] courtiers came to see him, he did not rise to receive them’.² Yet the mid-nineteenth century saw a steep decline in khwajasarais’ social standing as they were impoverished by British imperial expansion into Awadh.

This article examines historical transformations in the social status and political authority of khwajasarais. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the British East India Company's interventionist policies towards Indian-ruled principalities intensified, setting the stage for Awadhi khwajasarais to become embroiled in the sexual politics of imperial expansion. Eunuchs, represented as politically ‘corrupt’ officials, were central figures in colonial criticism of Awadhi ‘maladministration’, which equated misgovernment with gendered and sexual disorder. In 1848, the Company pressured the Awadh ruler or Padshah, Wajid Ali Shah, to make local labour regimes conform to colonial Victorian concepts of gender, politics and work. The Company sought to transform the meanings of khwajasarais’ work not by abolishing eunuch slavery, but by restricting khwajasarais to apparently ‘benign’, though menial, domestic forms of slave labour. Both the Padshah and the khwajasarais resisted colonial interventions into khwajasarais’ work and political influence. Yet the failure of the Padshah to remove eunuchs from positions of political power was one of the Company's primary justifications for the annexation of Awadh in 1856. Following the establishment of British colonial rule in Awadh, khwajasarais were transformed from slave-nobles into members of the Muslim poor of colonial Lucknow. The political and social decline of the khwajasarais signified the success of supposedly ‘rational’ colonial governance over older north Indian governmental cultures; these were replaced with an Indian administrative class overwhelmingly composed of free, high-caste Hindus.³ With colonial rule of Awadh, khwajasarais were demoted from their administrative functions and political authority. The khwajasarais were reduced to circumstances of impoverishment and political unimportance that they had not previously experienced. Thus, the history of the khwajasarais in mid-nineteenth-century Awadh provides a compelling window on the colonial refashioning of slavery, gender and governance in colonial India.

First, examining the Company's attempts to transform khwajasarai labour in Awadh deepens our knowledge of an under-studied group of Indian slaves. Not only were khwajasarais politically and socially significant persons, and thus important to our understanding of Indian-ruled polities, their history also serves to diversify our knowledge of the history of slavery in South Asia and in the nineteenth-century imperial world at large. A number of histories of medieval and early modern India mention the khwajasarais in passing.⁴ However, Indrani Chatterjee's study of slavery in Murshidabad in Bengal, which contains a section of several pages on khwajasarais, is the most in-depth existing study of eunuch slaves in South Asia.⁵ This article builds upon Chatterjee's work and illuminates the conditions of eunuch slave labour, khwajasarais’ political power and the ways that they formed communities of belonging. Moreover, I examine the historical processes by which khwajasarais were impoverished and dispossessed of political influence under colonial rule, contributing to our knowledge of the history of Islam, slavery and modernity in South Asia.

Second, this case study of Awadh contributes to literature on indirect colonial rule in India and suggests that the politics of imperial expansion were intertwined with sexual politics to a greater extent than most historians have acknowledged.⁶ Historians such as Michael Fisher, Sylvia Vatuk, Pamela G. Price and Mytheli Sreenivas have highlighted the fact that elite domesticity, kinship and reproductive sexualities became matters of intense Company interest because colonial understandings of princely succession were defined in terms of biological kinship.⁷ In Price's words, sexuality was at issue because of a ‘single-minded focus of the [colonial] state’ on political titles as ‘inherited property’.⁸ Yet the case study of Awadh suggests that even when princely succession was not at stake, issues of masculinity, sexuality, domesticity and kinship were at the centre of the politics of imperial expansion. Like Angma Jhala, who has examined the politics surrounding ‘who Indian princes chose as wives, lovers and companions’ in the 1920s, I argue that sexual politics were importantly intertwined with indirect colonial rule.⁹ Whereas Jhala focuses on ‘the sexual desires and love unions’ of princes, I analyse the implication of a wider range of intimate relationships in indirect rule, including kinship, discipleship, patronage and conjugality.¹⁰ Colonial arguments for the extension of British territory rested on politics surrounding the domestic sphere, intimate ties and different ways of being masculine.

In referring to the sexual politics of imperial expansion, I aim to draw attention to contests over the meaning of khwajasarais’ work and social networks between the Company, the Padshah, khwajasarais and other elites, courtiers and administrators. In so doing, this article draws on the work of scholars of sexuality and British imperial governance. In her study of the deployment of ‘family’ by the British and the Nawabs of the Carnatic, Sylvia Vatuk describes interactions between the British and Muslim elites as ‘a two-sided process of self-interested management of meaning’.¹¹ I have found Vatuk's emphasis on the management of meaning useful in analysing the significance of the khwajasarai community to the Company's annexation of Awadh. In particular, the politics of indirect rule involved the labelling of Indian sociopolitical structures and diverse social relationships as sexual and/or criminal. This point also resonates with Indrani Chatterjee's recent argument that in colonial India, aspects of ‘monastic governmentality’ – the organisation of early modern South Asian polities through teacher-disciple structures – were labelled as forms of ‘sexuality’.¹² Similarly, part of the process by which khwajasarai labour became the focus of rhetorical arguments for the expansion of Company territory was the categorisation of social and political practices associated with discipleship and patronage as deviant.

I first situate khwajasarais in structures of labour, politics and gender in early modern Awadh. Second, I examine the broader...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title page
• Copyright
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges
• Part I Labour
• Part II Commodities
• Part III Fashioning Politics
• Part IV Mobility and Activism
• Index
• EULA